This suggestion was motivated by my observation that officers from pods are frequently bad because of the randomized skills, and it feels bad to fire them all immediately. However, IMO, a handpicked level 5 officer is better 95% of the time than a random level 5, and hand picked 6 with two elite skills is better most of the time than a random level 7 with 5 random elite skills. That means that unless you explore super early before you find officers (which I don't like to do since I don't have the cargo to haul loot or the ability to survey lots of planets right away), you are very rarely taking pod officers.
I have also found that changing fleet compositions substantially mid campaign is a PITA if you have to fire and retrain officers for the new composition.
I had a couple ideas:
A simple idea for the pod officer issue is to make some (or all) pod officers not pre-trained, but still let them some of them level up beyond a standard officer (or have more elite skills or whatever). Honestly, I think the progression of leveling up an officer is way more fun than getting and random free officer.
A bigger idea is to have a way of changing/retraining officer skills. IIRC there are some mods that do this by letting you construct an academy where you can leave officers and also train them to have different skills. That might be a little too easy so maybe changing skills could cost story points, while simple aggression changes could just take time/money. You could also allow officers to gain experience over time at the academy. Certainly if it took an industry slot, I don't think that would be unbalanced, and it might even be fine as a structure. Or you could just have a few established faction academies that you could use if you are on good terms with the faction.
Being able to leave good officers that don't fit in your current fleet at an academy would generally be a huge QOL improvement.
I also think that having a way to retrain skills would make mentoring an officer feel way less mandatory, since you could just retrain if you get a real bad set of skills on a level up.
